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October 04, 2011

Time to Get Real in Iran and Syria

If Obama seriously wished to defend innocent
civilians against murderous regimes, he would rally to the side of one of the
world’s truly heroic figures, the Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi,
imprisoned for more than six years and subjected to severe torture.
Amazingly, he has continued his campaign from within Tehran’s grim Evin
Prison. No charges have ever been brought against him, although it is
obvious that he has been singled out for advocating separation of mosque and
state, toleration of minority religions, and respect for the civil rights of
the Iranian people. In recent days he has suffered a heart attack, but
has been denied medical attention. If he dies, perhaps the winged troika
of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, and their many admirers,
will mourn the death of this fine man, whom they have judged unworthy of
American support.

Can we agree that Iran and Syria now constitute a
single strategic problem? Surely Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme
leader, thinks so. Otherwise he would not have ordered the Revolutionary
Guards to conduct a policy of all-out military, financial, and intelligence
support for the Assad regime, combined with the usual deception (various public
statements urging Assad to be reasonable and settle his differences with the
protesters, a ridiculous fantasy). Khamenei knows that if Assad falls to
anything remotely resembling a free, representative government, the
consequences for Iran range from severely damaging to fatal.

The Syrian crisis is only one very dark cloud in
the terrible storm that has descended upon the Iranian regime.

That is why the current announced policy of the
Obama administration — “Assad must go” — is incoherent. First, because
once you have declared war on a regime, you are obliged to follow through with
real action, as in Libya. Second, because if Assad must go, so must
Khamenei. They are fused at the belly button, part and parcel of a
strategic alliance that is responsible for thousands of American deaths and
tens of thousands of American casualties.

Third, if you’re going to call for the end of
Assad, you’ve got to do something to make it happen.

To be sure, this president is not a big believer
in telling the world what he is up to, which could be meaningful. He
talks like Ganhdi and acts like LBJ (the LBJ who said “if you’ve got them by
the balls, the hearts and minds generally follow”). As everybody knows,
we are engaged in a very large covert war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in
and around Afghanistan and Pakistan. So far, the world has accepted his
Gandhian facade, accepting the cover story that the Libyan campaign was
waged by NATO (when most of it was us, including the training and logistics
provided to the “rebels”), and finessing the hi- and low-tech killing of
terrorists, which are so very reminiscent of Israel’s campaign against
Hamas. You are not going to find that comparison in the “leading” dead
tree media most anywhere in the Western world.

In short, it may well be that Obama has signed
the necessary “findings” authorizing our secret armies to support the foes of
the Assad and Khamenei regimes. Heaven knows there are lots of foes to
support (militarily, financially, and politically), from the peaceful
demonstrators in both countries to the not-nearly-so-peaceful Kurds and the
“New Syrian Army,” composed of defectors from Assad’s armed forces, now
fighting their former cohorts in several cities. If so, and if the
opposition forces want our assistance to remain secret, we should respect their
wishes. And by “we,” I most certainly include the journalists and
politicians who so avidly exposed the secret war conducted by the Bush
administration.

Whatever we are, or are not, doing on the ground,
we are certainly feckless in denouncing the evils of the Khamenei and Assad
regimes, and we are not doing nearly enough to denounce their dreadful
excesses. Clandestine operations do not preclude openly speaking the
truth about our enemies.

That the announced “Valkyrie” policy is little
more than an ideological gimmick is abundantly obvious by the administration’s
silence about the Iranian campaign of torture and slaughter against its own
citizens (it’s been a bit better about the Syrian mass murder).

If Obama seriously wished to defend innocent
civilians against murderous regimes, he would rally to the side of one of the
world’s truly heroic figures, the Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi,
imprisoned for more than six years and subjected to severe torture.
Amazingly, he has continued his campaign from within Tehran’s grim Evin
Prison. No charges have ever been brought against him, although it is
obvious that he has been singled out for advocating separation of mosque and
state, toleration of minority religions, and respect for the civil rights of
the Iranian people. In recent days he has suffered a heart attack, but
has been denied medical attention. If he dies, perhaps the winged troika
of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, and their many admirers,
will mourn the death of this fine man, whom they have judged unworthy of
American support.

Not that it’s personal, mind you; this
administration has always shrunk from speaking the truth about the Iranian
regime, which is now engaged in a “killing spree” at the expense of the
Persian nation. There have been so many executions and arrests of late
that it’s very hard to keep track of them all, ranging from movie directors to
Baha’is, from Christian converts to peaceful Sufi dervishes, and on to
political protesters and those unlucky enough to be in the area when the
security forces are unleashed.

This frenzy of repression — more a bloody orgy
than a spree — bespeaks enormous insecurity as well as the great evil about
which I have been warning for so long.